Suddenly, Love

31

THE NEXT DAY ERNST IS RELEASED FROM THE HOSPITAL and returns home. Irena had prepared the house carefully. Ernst is surprised. “Everything is in its place. I didn’t imagine that I’d ever be back here.”

“Now let’s celebrate,” Irena says, and she takes a cheesecake out of the refrigerator, like the one she had made for him on his seventieth birthday.

“Irena …” He doesn’t hold back his gratitude.

“Thank God you’ve come home.”

“I don’t know how to recite blessings, and I don’t think that I ever will.”

Irena doesn’t understand his comment. She remembers her dream and says, “Last night I had a dream about you.”

“About me?”

“You were in a courtroom.”

“And I was found not guilty?” He is eager to know.

“You were very quiet, and you smiled every once in a while.”

“Irena!” he cries out.

“What?” She raised her voice, as though she had been caught in a regrettable error.

“Why did you light candles?”

“On a holiday it’s customary to light candles, isn’t it?”

“What holiday is it today?”

“Isn’t your return home a holiday?”

On Passover Irena sets the table for the holiday. Ernst is very moved.

“I would like to say the blessings,” he says, “but I don’t know the melodies.”

“It’s just nice to sit at a Passover table,” Irena says.

Strange, Ernst says to himself, Sabbaths and holidays brighten Irena’s face, but they only depress me. I must have inherited this depression from my father.

“My father didn’t like holidays,” he can’t resist telling her. “My mother would set the Passover table exactly the way it had been set in her parents’ house, but that meticulousness embarrassed my father. He would skip things when he read the Haggadah, close his eyes, and sink into himself. His separation from his father and mother apparently pained him, but he didn’t talk about it. Sometimes in the middle of the Seder he would rouse himself and start singing.

“In the Party everything was in a ferment. Our activities were festive and full of energy, and they took place in the fields, in barns, and on riverbanks. For obvious reasons we weren’t called the Communist Youth but, rather, the Progressive Culture Club.

“By the age of twelve we had already learned to hate religious Jews. We would watch the way they hurried to the synagogue, speaking to one another in whispers, trading merchandise or promissory notes. The young commissars explained to us that no act of the Jews was pure. Everything was done with cunning or deceit. Helping the poor didn’t count with them, only performing rituals.

“We were organized into sections. Each section was divided into squads, and each squad had five members. We were supposed to steal from the Jewish stores. We would distribute the stolen goods to the needy in the poor part of the neighborhood. The mission had to be planned well. We would watch the store owner for a few days and figure out the opening and closing times. We would choose stores that didn’t have thick grilles or bolted doors. We didn’t examine only the doors and windows but also the narrow openings to the basements. We quickly learned that even a narrow opening offered an excellent gap that we could wriggle through.

“Usually we succeeded, but if we were caught, the section leader would hold an inquiry. If it turned out there had been a flaw in the plan, they would put the squad leader on trial, and sometimes the whole squad. It was like the army, and sometimes more serious. We often broke down the door of a store, and to cover our tracks we would burn down the store after robbing it.

“The violence was accompanied by a feeling of justice. We weren’t stealing for ourselves, but for the poor. The stolen goods would be delivered to the poor neighborhood at night, and there we would distribute it according to a list.”

Irena listens. It’s hard for her to understand this tangled reasoning, but in her heart she feels that the flaws Ernst keeps talking about haven’t yet been corrected in his writing.

A few days after he returns from the hospital, Ernst begins to talk about his summer vacations with his grandparents in the Carpathians. They dressed in long smocks, just like the peasants, and they were attached heart and soul to the fields of grain and the orchards. That was before the Communists arrived and confused everyone. The Communist years erased, among other things, those splendid sights. Ernst saw marvelous things during his visits to the Carpathians. But exactly what he saw is hard for him to say now. He makes an effort to remember.

Several times Irena finds Ernst drunk and merry when she arrives in the morning. She fears his drunkenness, and because of it she stays longer in his house. In truth, she feels that she has to stay with him to watch over him.

On one of his drunken nights Ernst embraced Irena. “You are my light,” he said. “You brought me everything that was stolen from me.” Irena was stunned but not frightened. His big body felt solid but also had a great gentleness, and she felt his hands on her, and his breath.

When she returned home that night, Irena couldn’t sleep. She walked from room to room and finally sat down and read the diary of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch woman who had died in the Holocaust. In her young life she had known many men and also a powerful love of God. Love of God and love of people are the same thing, Irena decided, but then became alarmed by this thought.